Hello team! Yesterday I needed to blow off some steam (pun pun pun) so I made a small batch of Spice Peach jam using a recipe and inspiration from my most recent acquisition, The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest. Guys, this book rocks. If you have any interest in canning, drying, freezing or otherwise hanging on to your fruits, veggies and recipes - this is the book. The instructions are thorough and user-friendly, with helpful anecdotes from the author's personal experience of a lifetime of preserving. This recipe came from that book, as did all the instructions for making it through my first attempt at home canning, and (so far; I'm hoping) the experiment was fully successful. Go me!
Here's how it happened.
I got motivated. I picked up the book at the cookery store down the street from me, and have been reading up on the equipment I need and the time investment I should count on for the process over the past week. Yesterday, I picked a recipe, knowing peaches wouldn't be available at the farmer's market too much longer, and set out to collect equipment and ingredients.
I stopped by the hardware store on my way to the farmer's market and bought a flat of (12) 1/2 pint jars. I also searched unsuccessfully for a jar lifter and (foolishly) forwent buying a canning funnel. It worked out pretty well without either piece but would have been easier with.
Ran off to the farmer's market and bought some veggies for the week; scored a free handful of hot chilies; and collected the 7 huge peaches I'd need for my recipe. Nom nom nom.
Now - for the good stuff.
Equipment
I'll just say right off the bat that I did not really have the appropriate equipment for this adventure. The large soup pot I use for everything, all the time is not really tall enough for canning - you're supposed to allow for 2 inches of extra water ("boiling room") above the jars when using the boiling water bath canning method, which only sort of worked when I laid the jars on their side (which I hear is a bad idea as the jars can crack). Anyway. I also didn't have a canning rack, which is supposed to sit on the bottom of the pot so the jars don't come in contact with the hot pot bottom. Lacking this piece put me in constant fear that my jars would explode while boiling, which turned out to (of course) be unfounded worry-worting.
Here's what I did have:
Aforementioned soup pot
Aforementioned jars and lids
Wooden spoon
Ladle
Smaller saucepans for boiling jar lids and transferring jam from large pot
And that's really all you need, at least to do it in the bootleg fashion I'll describe below. Hurrah!
Ingredients
4 pounds ripe but firm peaches, or about 7-8 large ones
5 cups (I KNOW) sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
That's it. Seriously. I was totally terrified by the 5 cups of sugar thing but what're you gonna do? I don't eat that much jam anyway.
Process
Phew. Bear with me folks, this is going to be a long one.
1. Peel, pit and chop your peaches. Chop 'em into small, bite-sized chunks; they'll break down a fair amount during cooking, but you'll be left with some amount of chunkiness, so make 'em small.
2. Throw all the ingredients in a large pot and cook on medium heat until sugar is dissolved.
3. Turn up the heat a bit and bring ingredients to a boil (DON'T put the lid on right now or you will be dealing with goopy sugary mess all over your stovetop. I did this TWICE, actually TWICE, and kept having to switch burners so I could clean the crap off the one I'd been using). Boil forever, or probably an hour, until mixture reaches 220 degrees F or until a glob of mixture slides off your spoon without glomming. You know what I mean. Look up "sheeting" if you don't.
5. While you're waiting, you can clean your jars and ready the lids. Since we're boiling our finished jars for longer than 10 minutes, the empty jars don't need to be fully sterilized first - just soak them in warm, soapy water for a little while and rinse/dry them well. Place your lids in a pot of gently boiling water to prepare the sealant. You don't need to boil the screw-tops; leave those with the jars.
5. In my case, since the only pot I had that was large enough to hold 4 pounds of chopped peaches was also the pot I planned to can in, I had to ladle the finished fruit goop into a smaller pot. Kind of a pain but not that big of a deal. I cleaned out my soup pot and filled it halfway with water, then brought it close to boiling (it's supposed to be 180 degrees but I didn't have a thermometer and it worked out ok. Hah!).
5. Fill your jars! If I had a canning funnel, this is where it would have really come in handy. As it was I had to ladle small amounts very carefully into each jar, then clean any drips off with a wet dishtowel. The jars should be filled with 1/4 inch of "headspace," or the space between the very top of the jar and the filling. Too much headspace translates to too much air for the boiling/vacuum-creating process to suck out, leading to an incorrect seal. Too little and the jars can overflow as the contents expand. Make sure you clean the outside of the threading carefully so the screw-tops don't stick. Add your lids and screw-tops and you're ready to can! Yuss!
6. The water in your boiling-water-bath-canner should be slowly boiling now, or at least with those little bubbles at the bottom that appear before boiling; add your jars. I just placed mine on their sides so they'd be fully submerged. Add more boiling (or hot) water so the water level is 2 inches above the tops of the jars. Bring to a vigorous boil.
7. Once boiling, set a timer for 15 minutes and turn down the heat to maintain a gentle boil throughout the 15 minutes. I had trouble with this because I kept getting distracted by Harry Potter on TV, so I'd go back to the pot to check and find that it stopped boiling entirely, but as long as you have at least a 5-minute attention span you should be ok.
8. When the timer goes off, get those jars outta there. Again, this would be a great point at which to have the correct equipment, but lacking a jar-lifter I executed a precarious ladle-and-wooden-spoon balancing act and tipped the jars right-side up onto a dishtowel. Let them cool for 12-24 hours and check the seal. If the lid does NOT compress, you've got yourself a seal! Good job!
So there you have it, folks. Real life home-preserving, without any exploded jars or spoiled frutas. I can't wait to try out this jam! Yum yum!
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